Blair Road
In which the entire Council of Bosses meets to discuss the situation.
Most of the bosses we’ve already met get at least a word in at this meeting. Bosses Marriott, Engles and Torin make their first appearances here, though all have been mentioned before.
Continue reading
In which first impressions are subject to revision.
On the other hand, the location of the school, and considering that the bookkeeper is apparently on first-name terms with her, suggests another possible answer to the question of where Ms Taylor came from.
One of the things about all these geography lessons is that we’re getting a lot of names of Bosses and their turfs. So far it’s been a mix of new and old; as a case in point, in this chapter there’s Boss Cruthers, who appeared in I Dare, Boss Wentworth, whom we were introduced to at Syl Vor’s first geography lesson, and Boss Marriot, who’s entirely new (by the sound of it, his or her turf is some distance off from the area around the Road where the action has mainly been focussed).
Day 376
Standard Year 1392
Blair Road
Surebleak
In which Boss Conrad throws a party.
And that brings us up to the end of Pat Rin’s 1392. If you don’t keep track of these things, that means he’s just about caught up with the end of Carpe Diem.
Which is interesting, because it’s been nearly three months since Pat Rin got the Plan B scatter order that kicked all this off, an event which is shown occurring – anyone? – that’s right, very near the end of Carpe Diem.
Now, that’s not a problem in itself, because I’d already figured out that the not-on-Vandar scenes in Carpe Diem aren’t necessarily in sync with the Vandar scenes – witness the entire journey of the Dutiful Passage from Arsdred to Krisko, sandwiched between two Vandar scenes that occur on a single day – but I do tend to wonder about some of the corollaries. If it was really three whole months from the Plan B scatter to when Korval started coming together again, what were people doing for all that time? Where did Nova go for three months before showing up on Liz’s doorstep? What were the crew of the Passage up to? (Apart from refitting the Passage as a battleship, which, to be fair, I have no idea how long that would be likely to take.)
And, what really bothers me, what were Val Con and Miri up to for those three months? Everything after the scene where Priscilla gets the info from Miri that leads to Nova activating Plan B is set during the week of Winterfair, right at the end of the year, so if Plan B was activated three months before the end of the year, that means Miri and Val Con had a very active first month on Vandar and a very active last few days, and in between was two or three months of nothing much happening. Which doesn’t feel right, somehow – not that it’s necessarily unlikely for a group of people in a remote town on a remote planet to have a quiet couple of months, but when I read Carpe Diem the gap doesn’t seem that long, and the active period preceding it feels like more than one month.